Notice anything different? Well, perhaps not on the surface, but this page is now AJAX powered. Basically, this post box is all AJAX, so you can flick back and forth between posts, without the page ever reloading. I can also hide code quite effectively, the first person to find the comment hidden in this post gets $10

I’m slowly cutting up Rodin, I’ve added an icon (look at your address bar), which I will set as a global variable later. Also added an RSS feed, largely thanks to the work of the original Rodin author. Next is an RSS aggregator, also eventually to be set globally and all configured from backend. There is one little thing that shits me about this, the title bar is now static, I know this can be changed using JavaScript, but whether I can tie that in to PHP and AJAX is another matter entirely.

So I’ve tweaked the backend a little, enlarged some input boxes and redone all the CSS, man what a mess! I would rewrite the whole thing from scratch but I doubt it would work properly afterwards. There’s a slight problem with the RSS feed, the links that are generated don’t quite work as it is no longer possible to call a post id via the address bar. Need to find a way to have the ID number parsed from the address bar in to the JavaScript for the AJAX functions.

Still no closer to implementing an RSS aggregator, the script I had doesn’t seem to like having it’s functions echoed later in the document, nor does it like having the feed variable set in another file (or a database for that matter). I have no intention of displaying other people’s content here, but I would like the CMS to support it. The only other thing on my To-Do list is add support for commenting, which shouldn’t be too hard. I’m also going to add an option in the backend to switch between ‘blog’ and ‘site’ mode, where either the most recent entry or the first entry is displayed by default.

I got evil-incarnate installed successfully, can’t believe you still need to edit a text file and upload it before you start the install. I thought this would have been addressed by now, as with most bloatware.

The AJAX side of things is merely a theme called Bloxpress, I have seen some other adaptations that are a little more advanced. But these seem to require too much mucking about to get installed and working properly, I’m sure we’ll start to see entirely AJAX based CMS’s real soon. The best mix of old and new that I have found is the unofficial V2 of the popular “Kubrick” theme. I’m currently working on a Web 2.0 themed template for this site, really just to poke fun at all the cliches of the style (gradients anyone ?).

AJAX Blog Demo